Fun fact about the Tomo chan dub is that the Japanese and English voice actor for Carol are actually the same person.

Animator Spotlight: Tadashi Hiramatsu Pt. 1

All gifs in order
Ranma 1/2 (1990)
Nadia: The Secret of the Blue Water (1990)
New Cutey Honey (1995)
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1996)
End of Evangelion (1997)
Now There Here and There (1999)
Jin Roh (1999)
FLCL (2001)
The Cat Returns (2002)
Paranoia Agent (2004)
Re: Cutey Honey (2004)
Beck Mongolian Chop Squad (2004)
Eureka Seven (2005)

Happy 1 day belated Birthday to Tadashi Hiramatsu. Hiramatsu has been a long running animator, and became one of the leading Gainax figures in the 2000s. Though he was a bit of a late bloomer and isn’t as well known compared to the other animators within the former Gainax wheelhouse like Takeshi Honda, Yoh Yoshinari, and Hiroyuki Imaishi he still made a career for himself as a solid character designer and professional illustrator.

Due to the amount of work Hiramatsu has accomplished over the years this spotlight will be split into two part, similar to Honda’s.

In college Hiramatsu was trained as an oil painter. An interesting start to say the least, but he began to get more experimental by using shadow puppets to portray 3 dimensionality to better understand animation. Hiramatsu got his start around 1987 working on Bugtte Honey and Mister Ajikko, with the former being his first step into key animation. A few years later he would animate for a studio Sunrise offshoot company called Nakamura Pro. Hiramatsu believed this would help him get a gig on Lupin III and it would later on. Hiramatsu would work in minor capacity on Akira and Sukeban Deka. Studio Curtain would get him involvement with Noriyuki Nakamura and Kenichi Shimizu who were advocates for his upbringing.

Everything changed when he worked on Nadia: Secret of The Blue Water. One thing that is very apparent from his more formal debut here is the very obvious influence of Yasuo Otsuka. Otsuka was a much older animator dating back to the 60s and 70s. His animation was very set in realism of the day, and not only was he a big influence on Hiramatsu but Katsuhiro Otomo also. This was a steady trend in the late 80s, and Hiramatsu capitalized on it. Especially here sakugabooru.com/post/show/201421 notice how the lion prowls is very old school Otsuka. There is also a serious level of expression within the movement. Hiramatsu also served as AD in this episode and 15.

Hiramatsu early 90s era was mostly key animation. He would do some animation direction on The E.Y.E.S of Mars but it wasn’t a very definitive position as what he would get later on. Evangelion would get Hiramatsu a big break into character acting. His animation past this point would become a lot more subtle, but he would start to work on some iconic scenes. Though a lot of his credits in the show would be a little hard to identify one that is forsure him is Misato listening to Kaji’s voicemail.

The subtle facial, movements, the tears, its just a a ton of subtlety that would get him placements on more emotional scenes in End of Evangelion, but before that here’s a lovely Rei drawing he did for the show.

The first scene would be the infamous hospital scene in the start of the movie sakugabooru.com/post/show/106532\. Later in the film though we couldn’t see his actual drawings due to heavy corrections from Kazuchika Kise the character acting here is spectacular. Magnificent storyboarding work, and amazing emotions displayed.

The second scene Hiramatsu would handle on the movie would be the horrifying scene of a giant Lilith Rei revealing herself to Shinji. It’s iconic and a lot of the slow plotting movement on 1s must have been super difficult to animate. sakugabooru.com/post/show/145530

The nightmare world of Shinji would be explored next by Hiramatsu. Though he would not key animate this scene Mamoru Kurosawa would be heavily corrected in minor movements and character designs. Hiramatsu’s character correction would actually be pretty consistent with Kise’s. sakugabooru.com/post/show/119581

The last scene he animated of course would be another iconic choke scene at the end of the film. Just pure greatness.

(forgive the Russian subtitle lol)

Due to the sheer focus and clearness in Hiramatsu’s key animation and animation direction in EOE he would be entrusted to do something he had never done which would be character designer on Kare Kano. Here I believe some of Hiramatsu’s designs are somewhat ahead of their time. The simplified look is very gratifying, and could look great in cel and digital animation mediums (just a personal observation).

Hiramatsu did a bunch of key animation on several episodes though it was never identified. Even made more unfortunate due to Gainax destroying the original master footage for some reason. This character art does lean heavily into Hiramatsu’s ethos which is “he strives for his animation to look like the photos taken for fashion magazines of the models relaxing after a shoot. This ‘caught-in-the-moment’, verite ethos is in stark contrast to the self-aware style of most major Gainax animators.”

The next big project for Hiramatsu would be Jin Roh, joined along with Honda and Yoshinari. Comparatively to the other two Hiramatsu was placed on scenes involving cars, and a lot of stark shots of city life. Many characters would be animated in his scenes, and with duress and direction and storyboards from Okiura, Hiramatsu acclimated perfectly. sakugabooru.com/post/show/118735
Okiura’s shot selection was especially effective at conveying the scale and depth of very simple scenes

Hiramatsu’s next project would be on FLCL, a joint effort between Gainax and Production I.G.. This show was so ridiculous and over the top it would essentially define Gainax and later on Trigger for years to come. Wrought with a mish mash of Kanada-school influence and realist/flow animation, there was no definable style for any animator to really cling to. Hiramatsu would embrace both by doing some super limited Kanada animation on Episode 5 sakugabooru.com/post/show/70163 with AD support from Kare Kano newcomer Hiroyuki Imaishi, and embrace more realism on Episode 6 sakugabooru.com/post/show/5993\. This would be a result of him also being under different direction as Episode 1, 3, and 6 would be AD’d by him. He of course would also assist with character designs.

2002 would be a fairly busy year for Hiramatsu being on three projects. The first would be Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Another character design venture, many of the more the simple designs from FLCL feel carried over into this show, and also embracing the absurdism too.


His next venture would be into The Cat Returns a somewhat of a sequel to Whisper of The Heart. sakugabooru.com/post/show/16595\. He would have some unidentified animation on Ghost in the Shell: SAC as well.

2004 would be the next busy year for Hiramatsu. The first would be a brief appearance on Paranoia Agent, and the second would be character designer on Re: Cutey Honey and the strange live action movie version. This was Hiramatsu’s second time on the franchise and he’d show out. Peak magic girl absurdity

Then towards the end of the year he’d work on the OP of Beck Mongolian Chop Squad along with Takeshi Honda.

Hiramatsu 0:41-0:46

Never seen this before those characters look so nice love the eyes very inviting

Will peep Magical Arcade off designs alone

added to my ptw just cause these character designs are so nice

footage of the show will be kind of s*** unfortunately, f***ing Gainax

Right they're so pretty

modern masterpiece frfr

just clicked through random points on the first ep on a few of the sites i use and it looked fine enough to me. not great by any means but perfectly watchable with some 90's low res charm

saw there was some frame rate issues on some sources, though it might be fixed on others